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Social Networks

Sites like Facebook and Twitter provide users with a place to share personal information with friends family and the public — an activity that's proven to be hugely compelling to Internet users. In response to the demand technology is evolving to encourage the disclosure of information that was formerly discreet (like location) and to enable the sharing of information even when not sitting in front of a traditional computer (like from mobile phones).

But it doesn't take much forethought to realize that there are countless privacy pitfalls in a world where a near-endless stream of personal bits is indiscriminately posted indefinitely stored and quietly collected and analyzed by marketers, identity thieves, and professional government snoops in America and abroad. The public controversies that have erupted to date — Facebook's drastic terms of service changes and Google Buzz's forced sharing of email contacts — are only the first snares in a rapidly growing thicket of social networking privacy issues.

Here are some of the ways EFF is working to protect your privacy as the use of social networks grows:

EFF has gone toe-to-toe with the government to uncover hidden details about how they use social networking sites for investigations data collection and surveillance.

Schwartz told The Daily Beast. “I’ve seen documents produced by the government regarding Hemisphere, but this is the first time I’ve seen an AT&T document which requires parallel construction in a service to government. It’s very troubling and not the way law enforcement should work in this country.”

AT&T built a powerful phone surveillance tool for police, called Hemisphere. Every day, AT&T adds four billion call records to Hemisphere, making it one of the largest known reservoirs of communications metadata that the government uses to spy on us. Law enforcement officials kept Hemisphere “under the radar”...

Having for years enforced a constitutionally offensive border search regime at physical borders and U.S. international airports, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) recently proposed to expand its violations in troubling new ways by prompting travelers from countries on the State Department’s Visa Waiver Program list to provide their “social media...

Political campaigns will spend an estimated $1.2 billion on digital ads this election cycle, and data on social media is helping tailor ads that will resonate with voters. Privacy experts say there are ways to safeguard your personal information, and Facebook says they have made it easier to adjust your...

In a statement, Attorney Stephanie Lacambra of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) described the use of social media monitoring by police departments as “incredibly troubling for the preservation of individual privacy.” “I often run into the widespread misperception that ‘because I’m not doing anything wrong,’ or ‘I have nothing to...